Chain emails to Twitter: the thrill of going viral

"I had something go viral and suddenly
the whole world changed," says Wired (US) editor and author of
And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral
Culture Bill Wasik, speaking at The Story in London.

In the late nineties, Wasik was obsessed with chain emails where
you had to scroll down past five screens of names to get to the
punch line of the joke. "The setup is effectively list of
endorsements," he says, and, he adds "often the joke did not
deliver". Nevertheless, it was the first evidence of viral content
being spread by a virtual community of strangers.

"What you had before the joke was a community where everyone was
implicated in bringing this thing to your inbox," he says, and it
was this concept that led him to perform a test called the Mob
Project.

He created a false email address then sent himself an email from
the Mob Project telling him to join a group of people outside of a
Claire's Accessories store in New York who would arrive from all
directions to join "an angry, enthusiastic crowd of accessories
shoppers".

"After ten minutes they would disperse and everyone would be
bewildered about what had happened," explains Wasik. He forwarded
it on to his friends, who presumed he was on some cool mailing
list, and they forwarded it on to their friends. But on the day a
line of police officers were stationed outside of the store and the
whole thing was broken up. Undeterred, Wasik's second attempt was
more successful. Around 200 people showed up at the same time in
Macy's rug department saying they lived in a commune and were
looking for a love rug.

"What happen next was the part that amazing, but somebody
blogged in the event and I started getting emails from Wisconsin
and California," says Wasik. People asked him if they could "steal
his idea", and as the phenomenon spread all over the US that
summer, a Californian blogger came up with the name "flash
mob".

"It never felt like something I did, it felt like something that
happened to me," he says. "Even those initial gatherings, everyone
that forwarded on that email was taking the project on as their
own."

Working as an editor he knew notionally that the things he was
writing were read by hundreds of thousands of people, but, he says,
it didn't have the same thrill and the same emotional impact as
later being retweeted by 23 strangers. "There was something about
the viral thing that feels different."

Virality is something that's unique to online content and can't
be replicated in print, because it "raises the houselights on the
audience," says Wasik. Online you're seeing specific people react
to you and you "get a thrill from that". The internet also provides
you with the numbers that allow you to quantify what you're doing,
he adds.

"What the internet gave to relatively ordinary people were these
quantified tools that help you understand how your things spread.
When you have the data the things you do end up being, for better
or for worse, quasi-scientific."

Doing this creates feedback loops, with successful content
breeding more successful content, but all content that goes viral
follows a similar trajectory, which peaks and troughs in a
relatively short space of time. "Viral culture is a culture of a
steep spike then a slow die off," says Wasik. "One of the thing
that excites me and disturbs me about internet culture is how memes
and celebrities catapult through."